Alex Wiegmann

Ruhr-Universität Bochum | RUB · Institute for Philosophy II

Lying is a familiar and important concept for virtually all of us, and philosophers have written a lot about what it means to lie. Although it is commonly accepted that an adequate definition of lying captures people's use and understanding of this concept, there have been surprisingly few empirical studies on it. n recent years, however, there is...

According to the ‘expertise defence’, experimental findings which suggest that intuitive judgements about hypothetical cases are influenced by philosophically irrelevant factors do not undermine their evidential use in (moral) philosophy. This defence assumes that philosophical experts are unlikely to be influenced by irrelevant factors. We discuss...

Lying is an important moral phenomenon that most people are affected by on a daily basis—be it in personal relationships, in political debates, or in the form of fake news. Nevertheless, surprisingly little is known about what actually constitutes a lie. According to the traditional definition of lying, a person lies if they explicitly express some...

According to the subjective view of lying, speakers can lie by asserting a true proposition, as long as they believe this proposition to be false. This view contrasts with the objective view, according to which lying requires the actual falsity of the proposition asserted. The aim of this paper is to draw attention to pairs of assertions that diffe...

Does lying require a speaker to explicitly express something (she believes to be) false, or is it also possible to lie with deceptive implicatures? Given that consistency with ordinary language is a desideratum of any philosophical definition of lying, several studies have addressed this question empirically in recent years. Their findings, however...

We conducted two experiments to see whether common folks think that the so-called telltale sign bald-faced lies are intended to deceive-since they have not been tested before. These lies involve telltale signs (e.g. blushing) that show that the speaker is lying. Our study was designed to avoid problems earlier studies raise (these studies focus on...

Consider the following case: Dennis is going to Paul’s party tonight. He has a long day of work ahead of him before that, but he is very excited and can’t wait to get there. Dennis’s annoying friend Rebecca comes up to him and starts talking about the party. Dennis is fairly sure that Rebecca won’t go unless she thinks he’s going, too. Rebecca: Are...

In several recent papers and a monograph, Andreas Stokke argues that questions can be misleading, but that they cannot be lies. The aim of this paper is to show that ordinary speakers disagree. We show that ordinary speakers judge certain kinds of insincere questions to be lies, namely questions carrying a believed false presupposition the speaker...

The present study examines cross-cultural differences in people’s concept of lying with regard to the question of whether lying requires an agent to say something they believe to be false. While prominent philosophical views maintain that lying entails that a person explicitly expresses a believed-false claim, recent research suggests that people’s...

According to the subjective view of lying, speakers can lie by asserting a true proposition, as long as they believe this proposition to be false. This view contrasts with the objective view, according to which lying requires the actual falsity of the proposition asserted. The aim of this paper is to draw attention to pairs of assertions that diffe...

The question of how people hold others responsible has motivated decades of theorizing and empirical work. In this paper, we develop and test a computational model that bridges the gap between broad but qualitative framework theories, and quantitative but narrow models. In our model, responsibility judgments are the result of two cognitive processe...

Assertions are our standard communicative devices for sharing and acquiring information. Recent studies seemingly provide converging evidence that assertions are subject to a factive norm: you are entitled to make an assertion only if it is true. However, these studies assume that we can treat participants' judgements about what an agent ‘should sa...

Deceptive implicatures are a subtle communicative device for leading someone into a false belief. However, it is widely accepted that deceiving by means of deceptive implicature does not amount to lying. In this paper, we put this claim to the empirical test and present evidence that the traditional definition of lying might be too narrow to captur...

According to the ‘expertise defence’, experimental findings suggesting that intuitive judgments about hypothetical cases are influenced by philosophically irrelevant factors do not undermine their evidential use in (moral) philosophy. This defence assumes that philosophical experts are unlikely to be influenced by irrelevant factors. We discuss rel...

Deceptive implicatures are a subtle communicative device for leading someone into a false belief. However, it is widely accepted that deceiving by means of deceptive implicature does not amount to lying. In this paper, we put this claim to the empirical test and present evidence that the traditional definition of lying might be too narrow to captur...

In this paper, we present and discuss the findings of two experiments about reference change. Cases of reference change have sometimes been invoked to challenge traditional versions of semantic externalism, but the relevant cases have never been tested empirically. The experiments we have conducted use variants of the famous Twin Earth scenario to...

Lying is an important moral phenomenon that most people are affected by on a daily basis— be it in personal relationships, in political debates, or in the form of fake news. Nevertheless, surprisingly little is known about what actually constitutes a lie. According to the traditional definition of lying, a person lies if they explicitly express som...

Indifferent lies have been proposed as a counterexample to the claim that lying requires an intention to deceive. In indifferent lies, the speaker says something she believes to be false (in a truth-warranting context) but does not really care about whether the addressee believes what she says. Krstić (2019) argues that in such cases, the speaker d...

In the ‘push-dilemma,’ a train is about to run over several people and can only be stopped by pushing a heavy person onto the tracks. Most lay people and moral philosophers consider the ‘push-option,’ i.e., pushing the heavy person, as morally wrong. Peter Unger (1992, 1996) suggested that adding irrelevant options to the push-dilemma would overtur...

In several recent papers and a monograph, Andreas Stokke argues that questions can be misleading, but that they cannot be lies. The aim of this paper is to show that ordinary speakers disagree. We show that ordinary speakers judge certain kinds of insincere questions to be lies, namely questions carrying a believed-false presupposition the speaker...

How do people hold others responsible for their actions? In this paper, we test and extend a computational framework originally introduced by Gerstenberg et al. (2018) that assigns responsibility as a function of two factors: a dispositional inference that captures what we learn about a person's character from their action, and the causal role that...

The field of moral psychology has become increasingly popular in recent years. In this chapter, we focus on two interrelated questions. First, how do peoplemake moral judgments? We address this question by reviewing the most prominent theories in moral psychology that aim to characterize, explain and predict people’s moral judgments. Second, how sh...

Empirical studies on moral dilemmas in which the principle of saving other people's lives conflicts with the prohibition on killing have shown that people consider harm more permissible when it is a side effect of a good action than when it is a means to a good end (Cushman & Young, 2011; Mikhail, 2011; Waldmann, Wiegmann, & Nagel, 2017). These jud...

Lying is an everyday moral phenomenon about which philosophers havewritten a lot. Not only the moral status of lying has been intensively discussed butalso what it means to lie in the first place. Perhaps the most important criterion foran adequate definition of lying is that it fits with people’s understanding and use ofthis concept. In this light...

In the so-called push dilemma, an out-of-control speed-train is about to run over five people and can only be stopped by pushing a heavy person onto the tracks. Most lay people and moral philosophers consider it morally wrong to kill the heavy person. Unger (1992, 1996), however, argued that adding irrelevant options to the push dilemma would overt...

Is it possible to lie despite not saying anyhing false? While the spontaneous answer seems to be 'no', there is some evidence from ordinary language that a lie does not require what is said to be believed-false. In this paper, we will argue for a pragmatic extension of the standard definition of lying. More specifically, we will present three exper...

Lying is an everyday moral phenomenon about which philosophers have written a lot. Not only the moral status of lying has been intensively discussed but also what it means to lie in the first place. Perhaps the most important criterion for an adequate definition of lying is that it fits with people’s understanding and use of this concept. In this l...

Can a question be a lie? Theorists in the debate on how to define lying tend to answer this question negatively. They hold that questions can be misleading, but that they cannot be lies. The aim of this paper is to show that ordinary speakers disagree. With the help of three experiments, we show that ordinary speakers judge certain insincere questi...

Assertions are our standard communicative tool for sharing and acquiring information. Recent empirical studies seemingly provide converging evidence that assertions are subject to a factive norm: you are entitled to assert a proposition p only if p is true. All these studies, however, assume that we can treat participants' judgments about what an a...

According to epistemic closure, if someone knows some proposition P and also knows that P entails Q, she knows Q as well. This is often defended by appealing to its intuitiveness. Only recently, however, was epistemic closure put to the empirical test: Turri ran experiments in which closure is violated in folk knowledge ascriptions surprisingly oft...

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Lying is an everyday moral phenomenon about which philosophers have written a lot. Not only the moral status of lying has been intensively discussed but also what it means to lie in the first place. Perhaps the most important criterion for an adequate definition of lying is that it fits with people’s understanding and use of this concept. In this l...

The ‘Ought implies can’ principle (OIC) states that if you lack the ability to do X, then you are not morally obligated to do X. While philosophers believed it to be both normatively adequate and intuitively compelling, recent empirical findings suggest that laypeople reject OIC. In this paper, we suggest a pragmatically grounded model of the relat...

According to the epistemic closure principle, if someone knows some proposition P and also knows that P entails Q, she knows Q as well. This principle is often defended by appealing to its intuitiveness. But only recently was epistemic closure put to the empirical test: Turri ran experiments in which closure is (allegedly) violated in folk knowledg...

In this review we make a simple theoretical argument which is that for theory development, computational modeling, and general frameworks for understanding moral psychology researchers should build on domain-general principles from reasoning, judgment, and decision-making research. Our approach is radical with respect to typical models that exist i...

According to the traditional definition of lying, somebody lies if he or she makes a believed-false statement with the intention to deceive. The traditional definition has recently been challenged by non-deceptionists who use bald-faced lies to underpin their view that the intention to deceive is no necessary condition for lying. We conducted two e...

Most theories of moral judgments distinguish between acts and outcomes. According to these theories, moral judgments are either primarily based on the evaluation of the acts or the outcomes with multi-system theories allowing for both possibilities. Here we argue that it is not only the acts and outcomes that determine moral evaluations but also th...

Experimental restrictionists have challenged philosophers’ reliance on intuitions about thought experiment cases based on experimental findings. According to the expertise defense, only the intuitions of philosophical experts count—yet the bulk of experimental philosophy consists in studies with lay people. In this paper, we argue that direct (expe...

In this article, it is argued that empirical data can undermine normative arguments generated by intuitionist methodologies that involve a step of inducing an abstract principle from a set of case-based moral intuitions. The use of case-based intuitions in normative theory construction is conceptualized here as an inductive inference procedure in w...

Trolley dilemmas are widely used to elicit moral intuitions. Most people do not think it would be morally right to push a heavy man from a bridge, thereby killing him, in order to avoid the death of several other people. Here we empirically tested a prediction by Unger (1996) who claims that adding more options to this scenario would shift people's...

In this article, it is argued that empirical data can undermine normative arguments generated by intuitionist methodologies that involve a step of inducing an abstract principle from a set of case-based moral intuitions. The use of case-based intuitions in normative theory construction is conceptualized here as an inductive inference procedure in w...

Explaining moral intuitions is one of the hot topics of recent cognitive science. In the present article we focus on a factor that attracted surprisingly little attention so far, namely the temporal order in which moral scenarios are presented. We argue that previous research points to a systematic pattern of order effects that has been overlooked...

In recent years, a number of philosophers have conducted empirical studies that survey people's intuitions about various subject matters in philosophy. Some have found that intuitions vary accordingly to seemingly irrelevant facts: facts about who is considering the hypothetical case, the presence or absence of certain kinds of content, or the cont...

uni-goettingen.de) Jonas Nagel (jnagel1@uni-goettingen.com) Stefan Mangold (smangol@gwdg.de) Abstract Explaining moral intuitions is one of the hot topics of recent cognitive sciences. In the present article we focus on a factor that attracted surprisingly little attention so far, namely the temporal order in which moral scenarios are presented. We...

The past decade has seen a renewed interest in moral psychology. A unique feature of the present endeavor is its unprecedented interdisciplinarity. For the first time, cognitive, social, and developmental psychologists, neuroscientists, experimental philosophers, evolutionary biologists, and anthropologists collaborate to study the same or overlapp...

The scientific study of morals has been subject to a tremendous change throughout the past decades, eliciting various theoretical models, paradigms, and methodologies from disciplines as philosophy, social and developmental psychology, cognitive science, or anthropology. This chapter reviews some of the main approaches to study human moral judgment...